


Keep Going Back

by yet_intrepid



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Ambiguous Gender Changes, Gen, Period-Typical Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 06:45:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1972890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid/pseuds/yet_intrepid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjolras and Combeferre face down oppression across the world in the twentieth century. They walk into its grip, over and over and over.</p>
<p>This century wasn't supposed to be like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep Going Back

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the song "In Another Life" by Vienna Teng (I gripped your hand / and caught a glance / of the next time round.)

They’re dragged off a bus in Missouri for not knowing their place. They’re killed at sixteen.

They’re drafted. No protest avails. They ship to Vietnam; one makes it a month and the other a year. They’re twenty-one and nineteen.

They keep going back.

They resist in Algeria. They waste away slowly as prisoners of war, flexing their minds as long as they can with philosophy, history, science. Dates on the records: 1938 – 1961 and 1940 – 1961. The cease-fire comes in March sixty-two.

They’re miners’ children in the aftermath of the Matewan Massacre. They’re angry. They get mixed up with some angry adults, and maybe the soldiers don’t look where they’re hitting. They’re dead on the roadside, ten and twelve.

They’re in a camp in Siberia, a camp in occupied Poland. They’re shouldering extra work, sharing warmth and food and snatches of hope, waiting and praying and planning. They’re bombing the empty gas chambers in the middle of the night. They’re digging tunnels under the barbed wire and sending out the sick, the old, the ones with families. They’re counting the cost and saying, we must do what we must.

They’re in Cuba, Albania, China. They’re fifteen, twenty-two, seventeen.

They keep going back.

They’re in East Berlin, armed, in the shadows, picking off the guards on top of the wall. “He might be your brother,” says the one, as a beam of light catches the face of a young soldier they have met once in the street. “He is,” says the other, and shoots.

The soldier’s backup is closer than they thought, and soon they’re bleeding out in the alleyway.

They keep going back.

In 1952 in Egypt they die at twenty-four. In 1978 in Nicaragua they die at nineteen. In 1985 in the Philippines, they die at fourteen and sixteen.

They keep going back.

Someday, somehow, they’re going to make the twentieth century happy.

**Author's Note:**

> Although I tried to do my research, I wrote this piece quickly and have only passing familiarity with some of the events discussed in the fic, which is why I tried to leave Enjolras and Combeferre's roles open-ended in the scenarios I know less about. It was a tricky situation, in that I could either stick to what I know and make the fic far too centered on America and Western Europe, or risk the chance of including wrong details and implying ideologies that don't line up with the characters. Hopefully I have avoided both through not specifying too much.


End file.
